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Wonder how much of Windows 10 was written by Stack Exchange?
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Satya Nadella has given an evasive answer there and both Zuckerberg and the journalists have been taken in.
It is common in programming languages that have a lot of boilerplate to use code generation, where you take some information about data and generate code automatically, like code that translates data between formats (for example reading and writing xml for saving to disk or json to send over the network). Being very routine to write and easy to deduce logically from other information, this process has been automated for years and years, long before AI existed.
Microsoft's flagship software such as operating systems, office software, is unbelievably vast and complex, far beyond the complexity of most business software, and has been developed over decades. They absolutely have not replaced 30% of their code since the very recent advent of useful AI. I can believe that 30% of it is automatically generated, but not by AI.
And its all Teams.
Does that mean that Microsoft shares are gonna crash?
"30% of my pants is pooped"
Yeah, I can tell every time I have to use that dinosaur of an OS.
It shows
Stole it as if I wrote it
Windows is 95 percent pure bloat now imo, an os just needs to handle my hardware and launch my programs anything else is just eating my resources.
I don’t need any assistance from anything while my phasers and quantums aren’t doing anything. I don’t need AI doing anything when I finally get the proper setup for crashing a Tomcat into a big old mountain that only a fool would miss. I don’t need any bloat while I’m ripping off an old cartoon character for a D&D campaign.
If they mean “30% of the code we wrote last month” then I might believe it. Though I bet it is not across the board but deep in one or two areas. Still, it’s a crazy number.
But he said something like “30% of the code in our repositories” which would mean everything, including their entire legacy of code. And that I simply do not believe.
My first thought on reading that is: yeah, like about 98% of the human genome is "junk DNA" that we have little or no idea what it might be doing. Sometimes when we cut it out, nobody ever notices, sometimes when we cut it out the system won't boot up.
Its a shit article with Tech crunch changing the words to get people in a flap about AI (for or against), the actual quote is
"I'd say maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software"
"Written by software" reasonably included machine refactored code, automatically generated boilerplate and things generated by AI assistants. Through that lens 20% doesnt seem crazy.
I've been "automatically writing code" for a system of about a dozen modules - we specify a glue file in .json between all the modules and the code generating software makes units to go in each module to do the communication interfacing based on the glue spec. That system has been running for more than 10 years now, it writes a couple hundred thousand lines of "new code" every time we modify the glue file.
The A stands for Automation, right?
It wouldn't surprise me at all if they entered the entire codebase for Windows 11 into an LLM and asked it to optimize it or some shit lol
And surprise surprise, it's worse than ever
Funny considering windows 7 consists of exactly 0% AI generated code.
lmao I just said the same thing before reading your comment
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Of course it's just bad writing, but I kind of wouldn't put it past management to try shoving their multitude of codebases through an LLM at this point.
Are they including stuff written by intellisence and boiler plate for legacy code?
How much of Linux is?
If you count all of my contributions, 0%.
None of my contributions have been included. I am a terrible programmer.
We can tell
Copilot. Piloting you towards effortless bugs, and with all the telemetry, we don’t need to test our patches and updates. You, the user are doing that for us. Sincerely, Microsoft.
Is this why they haven't said why they one folder needs to be there. They actually don't know.
I'm out of the loop here
Basically, there was a security flaw with Microsoft's Internet Information Services (web server software) that could be exploited by an attacker to gain access to files and folders they shouldn't be able to (permission escalation?). Well, instead of providing an actual fix to the problem as a whole, they applied a bandaid fix by creating a new folder named "inetpub" on peoples system drive, and apparently the presence of the folder is able to prevent the exploit from working. People noticed the folder and deleted it because they thought it was being created by an attacker, so Microsoft had to tell people not to delete it.
Work for a big software company. With all the offshoring of devs, I expect most of our code is now AI. And it shows.
How does it show? (Asking for red flags, not to create an argument).
Quality degredation and Disjointed experience comes to minds. Microsofts tech is such a mess right now i dont know how they come back from it honestly. Too many competing frameworks, bad schemas, broken tooling, bad documentation.
Im not even factoring in windows 11.
I used to be a windows dev guy, but with this landscape I dunno why i would do it to myself. Developing for linux systens is such a better experience. At least there are standards and ubernerds who adhere to them.
Coming back from this is easy.
Extend support for windows 10 for another 4 years. Take a break from their OS release cycle and get the next OS right. Remove the Microsoft account mandate from sign in. Remove AI by default. Remove Ads, weather, news and other bloat from the OS. The focus should be creating the cleanest, simplest, abstraction between the user and the hardware.
Is the part that handles images in word
This is my own experience but the past few years Windows has been extremely dependable for me and then in the last few months the updates they’ve have been terrible. I’ve seen more blue screens recently than I have in a lot of years.
All this to say that if it is 30% AI code being used then it’s very telling!
I don't remember in my 2 decades of working my work machine causing me to lose work due to a Windows update. In the last year, it happened to me 3 times. One was due to Crowdstrike. The latest update also recently broke my remote setup. Not completely their fault but still a crappy time. The one other time was due to an update (must've been the forced win11 one) killing the wifi and then Windows hiding any options to fix it, a bug from Windows 10.
Windows was always garbage to be honest, windows 7 was the best release in my opinion. You are correct though it is way worse these past months. By the way does your mouse lag when the update notification comes up?
Windows 7 was peak windows. Its been downhill from there
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So the CEO is trying to tell investors that they are saving money by not paying employees. But to me it sounds more like: we are letting our sub-par products continue to enshitify, and any other company using AI to program will be equal competition.
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